San Francisco Film Society Oral History Project Interview with ...

CLAUDE JARMAN: I don’t know where Albert was going to go. Where could he go? He wasn’t going
to quit. Albert always had a great sense of the dramatic. He loved it. He and I used to have these battles
every year about what he was going to do, and his pay, and all this. And we’d just laugh about it, and
say, “Albert’s not going to go anywhere. He’ll go around, and then he’ll take off in the fall after the
Festival, and he’ll be treated around the world as the program director of San Francisco, and then come
time to go to the Cannes Festival, he’ll show up. And—
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: And he did.
CLAUDE JARMAN: And he did, he always did.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: I know you said that in the earlier years he was doing just the
retrospectives, but by now he was more in—
CLAUDE JARMAN: He was more in film selection, because he would see a lot of films. And we would
see a lot of films that would come in. And so we would finally sit down—and I think Mark and Lorena
were involved at that point—we’d all sit down and make a selection. We compromised. He would want
certain films and I would want certain films, and it always worked out pretty well.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: So it was a fairly loose structure of who selected the films. It wasn’t a
committee or anything like that.
CLAUDE JARMAN: Not at that point. We did not have a committee.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Now this was after the severance from the Chamber. Did you have
offices?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Yes.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Where was it?
43